Hey MP, > > [Platt] > > Just as you wouldn't know many without one, you wouldn't know ugliness > > without beauty. > > MP: My recollection of philosophers is weak. Was it Aquinas that posited > that > "bad" is nothing but the absence of "good"? Things are not "bad", they are > simply more or less endowed with "good." Good is the currency of reality; > the > more there is of it, the more obvious it is. > > Eerily related to Quality, IMO.
Not familiar with Aquinas that much, but he (and Pirsig) make the point -- Quality is (the currency of) reality. It can be low, high or something in between, depending on individual experience. In the hot stove example, Pirsig observes: "This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience: It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience." (Lila, 5) In fact, in the MOQ low quality is necessary: "If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process." (Lila, 29) Looking at the levels one sees not only higher and lower levels in terms of morality, but there is a scale of high and low morality within levels, e.g., in the biological level an animal is higher on the scale than a plant, in the social level a democracy is higher than a dictatorship, etc. Yes, "Good is the currency of reality" -- high, low and in between. In MOQese, "bad" means low Quality just as "ugly" means low Beauty. Platt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
